The Power on Israeli TV

[Blight]

I haven't quite seen it yet. Seen the promo though and it looks funny enough.

I have seen it available for download on eMule if anyone is curious, search for "The Force joker_man".

[Blight]

Ok, I've seen it and here's a short review:

Basically, this is "sort of" like american idol for psychics.
They gathered a few 100's of people claiming to have psychic powers and on the first show they did two tests of their "powers" and the 10 people who did the best were put into the show.

Test #1:
They took a picture of a famous Israeli singer who killed himself 20-30 years ago and put it in a sealed envelope. Participants were asked to say the name of the person pictured.

Two people were able to get the name right while a few others described his facial features pretty well (he has somewhat distinct facial features).

Test #2:
In the second test, they brought in 3 people who had an interesting relationship. A father and two daughters, one of the daughters was put up for adoption and when she got older, she found her biological mother and sister and later on her father. They were all sitting in chairs and they had what appeared to be clay or plaster masks on (to hide the family resemblance and possibly to make it difficult to read facial expressions).

8 people sort of got the relationship right, a few got it very accurately.

The Judges:
There are 4 judges. A very skeptic radio host, a skeptic TV presenter (not the presenter on this show, but for another show), a somewhat skeptic actress and a true believer ex-soccer player.

The problem with the judges as I see it is that while the radio host is a true and honest skeptic, he doesn't have the experience at detecting fraud someone like randi has. And all you forum skeptics should be aware, even if you're very perceptive, a real pro con-man might be able to leave you puzzled if you're not intimately familiar with the actual techniques used.

My Analysis:
What I'm really wondering here is if people behind the camera (camera person/producer/director/etc) were aware of the picture content (for test one) or the family connection (for test two). Because if they were, a good cold-reader might have picked up signals from them directly.

You could see people were sort of guessing along and then they become more sure (as one would get if he picks up certain unconscious cues from the production team).

I'm going to write another post on this subject in a different thread, I have an interesting idea.